St Paraskeve in the Balkan Context

The cult of the great saints is usually much wider and involves more than their hagiographies alone. These, as a special literary genre, have to consider strict compositional principles and an even stricter church canon. Not even the apocryphal hagiographies, although they most often originate in oral tradition, can completely escape the influence of these norms, which come into play as soon as an oral legend starts gaining the form of a literary composition. The cult is rather freer and much less dependent on the Church. Once they become a part of popular religion, the officially recognised saints almost invariably enter a ready-made semantic field that acts as their natural surroundings. Here, by the working of many generations, they build up the multilayered, developed, often unexpected, but always logical connections with the tradition and the culture to which they belong. These fertile and inescapable interactions are reflected in elements of folklore, especially folk literature, from the major prose forms like folktales and epic poetry, to the so-called minor genres (nursery rhymes, incantations, proverbs, and so on). In association with other elements of material and spiritual traditional culture (such as rites, customs and beliefs), stories about the saints tended to spread everywhere, rendering their roots and influences difficult to elucidate.     

Socialist Intercessions: The Earliest Demands for a Separate Montenegrin Language (1967–1972)

The question of a separate Montenegrin language has been extensively debated in the last decades. Its roots, however, lie deeper, with the first demands for it appearing in the late 1960s. By analysing the contemporary sources, this paper seeks to establish how and by whom these demands were voiced, the argumentation of both sides of the debate and how were they received by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The debate was started by a group of Montenegrin intellectuals in a climate favourable to the “political periphery” of socialist Yugoslavia and the smaller nationalisms. The group, supported by some of the high executives of the Communist Party, claimed that the rights of the Montenegrin nation were being negated by the government's refusal to allow the local language to be codified to a literary standard. The discussion sheds light on the process of nation-building in socialist-era Montenegro, revealing its actors and dynamics.     

The goodness of fit and statistical significance of seriation solutions

This paper presents a method for determining the statistical significance and goodness of fit of seriation solutions based on correspondence analysis. The basic assumption is that seriation solutions corresponding to relative chronological sequences should have unimodal distributions of types across assemblages in a sequence. In order to evaluate significance of chronological signal in data, the observed number of modes of a seriation solution based on correspondence analysis is compared to a distribution of number of modes generated by randomization of the original data table. A quantitative measure of the goodness of fit is presented. The method is tested on two data sets: 1) archaeological data with a known chronological ordering 2) non-archaeological data without a chronological patterning. The method successfully detected a significant chronological signal in the former, and failed to detect it in the latter.     

Serbian Spatial Planning among Styles of Spatial Planning in Europe

The classification of spatial planning styles in Europe has been successively reviewed a few times. Most recently, it has been done in the framework of the European Spatial Planning Observatories Network (ESPON) 2.3.2 project dealing with the territorial governance. Based on national overviews for 29 European countries, this project uses the classification of spatial planning systems in four styles: comprehensive-integrated, regional-economic, land-use and urbanism. This study did not take into account the spatial planning system in Serbia since it is neither in the European Union nor a member of the ESPON similar to Norway and Switzerland. This article uses the form of national overviews elaborated for the ESPON project and puts Serbia in a comparative spatial planning perspective, classifying it between the comprehensive-integrated and land-use planning styles.     

Nationalist geographies in interwar Yugoslavia: manoeuvring between national and transnational spaces

Taking into consideration several seemingly contradictory characteristics of Yugoslav geography, this article examines the employment of transnational spaces by the competing nationalist geographical narratives in interwar Yugoslavia. Though preoccupied with Yugoslavia and its political crises, at the beginning and the end of the interwar period Yugoslav geographers were concerned with international political developments, especially in East Central Europe. There were tensions between a geographical region and a national space as a preferred framework of research as well as between the belief that the political, economic and cultural development of Yugoslavia was unique and that it was comparable to development of other parts of East Central Europe. The determinist understanding of the nation as shaped by the physical landscape emphasized not only the ability, but also the necessity, of nationalist geographies to function on multiple spatial levels. Yugoslav geographers used the conceptual apparatus developed by French and German geographical traditions to establish a comparative framework in which they elaborated on various geographical characteristics of Yugoslavia, especially those politically significant, by referring to other European countries because it seemed difficult to describe the new country in terms of itself. German Geopolitik became particularly influential and, although taking different stands on it, several Yugoslav geographers pointed to geopolitical similarities with Czechoslovakia and Poland to draw conclusions regarding Yugoslavia. But geographical comparison had ambiguous implications, as it was used both to fortify and challenge the interwar Yugoslav state.     

Ruptures and continuities in nationhood narratives: reconstructing the nation through history textbooks in Serbia and Croatia

While the (mis) use of history to fuel particular constructions of the nation is well‐documented in the literature, the ways in which nationhood narratives and national ideologies evolve and transform over time are rarely explored. When ruptures – such as state failure or civil war – occur, interpretations of history and nationhood narratives cannot be completely rewritten. Rather, they need to follow up upon previous, established versions, relying on anchoring motives that offer a minimum level of continuity. Relying on a systematic analysis of over forty years of history revisionism in Serbia and Croatia (1974 to 2017), I demonstrate the discursive ways in which nationhood narratives evolved over time and space: from the dismantling of the former common Socialist narrative, replacement with new ethno‐national narratives, the bumpy transformations through the democratic transitions, to the gradual consolidation into the ‘new’ reconstructed nationhood narratives prevailing in the two countries today.     

Effect of the joint type on the bearing capacity of a multi–drum column under static load

The results of an experimental study on the effect of the joints between the blocks on the ultimate bearing capacity of a multi-drum column loaded to centric vertical force and horizontal force in the middle of its height are shown. The column is approximately 2.5 m high, with one hinge at the top and another hinge at the bottom. Four types of joints between the blocks were considered: a dry joint (column C-DJ) and joints with stone powder (column C-SPJ), lead (column C-PBJ), and epoxy (column C-EPJ). The applied vertical and horizontal forces, horizontal displacement, vertical strains, and horizontal circumferential strains in the middle of the column height, as well as shortening of the column, were measured. Under axial compression, ratios between the ultimate load bearing capacities of tested columns were C-EPJ: C-DJ: C-SPJ: C-PBJ = 1: 0.68: 0.59: 0.51. The bearing capacity of the tested columns with regard to the horizontal force depended on the level of the applied centric compression force. Columns with soft joints (C-PBJ, C-SPJ) had the largest shortening and the largest horizontal displacements for the equal forces.     

Modeling Expansive Phenomena in Early Complex Societies: the Transition from Bronze Iron Age in Prehistoric Europe

The Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in Prehistoric Europe represents a perfect case study to test different and competing hypotheses of social dynamics and economic change in small-scale societies. The paper discusses the possibilities of modeling what could have happened in Europe between 1800 and 800 bc, in terms of spatiotemporal dynamics. The paper presents some theoretical aspects of the dynamic study of expansive phenomena and gives an overview of a computer model programmed to explain the way new burial forms expanded in Europe. The main idea is comparing classic demic diffusion models (spread of population), cultural transmission models (spread of ideas), and technological innovation diffusion model (spread of goods). We will present the fundamentals of a preliminary study towards the computational simulation of such hypothetical social mechanisms, using a dataset composed of more than 1,500 georeferenced and radiocarbon dated archaeological contexts of a period between the Early Bronze Age and the first Iron Age (1800–800 bc) from an area including the North-East of Iberian Peninsula, Southern France, Northern and Central Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Southern Germany.